Cloud Platforms or Platform as a Service (PaaS)

In the PaaS model, cloud providers deliver a computing platform typically including operating system, programming language execution environment, database, and web server. Application developers can develop and run their software solutions on a cloud platform without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. With some PaaS offers, the underlying compute and storage resources scale automatically to match application demand such that cloud user does not have to allocate resources manually. Examples of PaaS include: Amazon Elastic Beanstalk, Heroku, EngineYard, Google App Engine, and Microsoft Azure.